Subject: Re: namedroppers mismanagement, continued

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 12:28:58 -0600

Thus spake "Keith Moore" <[email-masked]>
> > The list moderator asked him to add his email address to the list, and
> > indicated that as a result of doing so his mail would be unmoderated. Is
it
> > so hard to do?
>
> frankly, it's ridiculous to expect people to subscribe to every list to
which they
> wish to contribute.

Frankly, it's ridiculous to expect either (a) all WG members to receive
dozens of spams per day due to no filtering, or (b) the WG chair to read and
manually approve any emails (among the dozens of spams) which are relevant.

We have the least-bad technical solution in place today.  We'd all like open
lists, but the community's inability to control spam has made that a moot
point.

S

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 10:47:59 -0800

(namedroppers removed as my comment is more of a meta-comment on running
mailing lists and I'm not subscribed to namedroppers itself)

Olafur Gudmundsson <[email-masked]> writes:

> Randy is currently wasting valuable time in manually scanning 100+ spams
> a day that are sent to namedroppers and other IETF mailing lists he runs
> and we all should thank him for the good citizen service he provides!
> Every meesage that is reposted from the bounced list contains a header
> explaining that posting address is not a subscribed address.

This is an obnoxious amount of work.  I can thank him for the service he's
providing in trying to keep the list free of spam and also think that this
is way more work than someone should be expected to do.  :)

While I really dislike the technology when applied to personal mailboxes,
this sounds like a place where a confirmation system would work well.  If
the list receives a message from a non-subscriber, send back a message
saying so and asking them to respond and include a confirmation code of
some kind, similar to mailing list subscription confirmations.  If they do
so, release the message into the mailing list and also whitelist their
address (in case they're participating in an ongoing discussion).

My experience with a technique like this is that it eliminates 99% of the
spam still, is reasonably intuitive for at least a technical audience, and
eliminates the need for anyone to wade through all the spam to look for
the gems, a task that I would not wish on anyone.  It also has the side
advantage of being unassailably impartial.

We all already spend far too much human effort dealing with spam.
Centralizing that human effort onto one person optimizes it somewhat but
still wastes valuable time that could be better used for some productive
purpose.  It's rather like periodically cleaning the bathroom, and if
there were some way we could get computers to do that for us, I think we
should jump at the chance, even if the computer doesn't do *quite* as good
of a job.  :)

This solution does require some additional setup on the server side:  The
list software has to be able to do those sorts of confirmations, has to
maintain a server-side queue of messages that are pending confirmation,
and has to implement the whitelist system.  It would likely require a
small amount of work to implement over an existing mailing list manager,
and I'm certainly not suggesting that Randy have to do that implementation
work.  But since this situation comes up very frequently for IETF mailing
lists, perhaps someone could volunteer to implement this feature for
whatever mailing list management software the IETF mailng list system is
using?  That would at least help the problem for people hosting their
lists with the IETF.

I wonder if Mailman already has this feature.  If not, that might be a
good place to start in adding it, since Mailman is very actively developed
and seems to be passing the venerable Majordomo as the most widely
deployed mailing list management system.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 23:41:31 -0500

> > - in the current situation, even postings from occasional posters
> >   are being blocked.  and when postings are blocked, the message is
> >   terse and cryptic (even insulting) and contains no clue about how
> >   to workaround the problem
> 
> Do you have specific recent examples of this? If it is the case it needs to be
> fixed.

I think I was simply mistaken about this ; I was remembering the 
"post from non-subscriber" messages I'd seen recently and confusing
them with the "list won't accept posts from non-subscribers"
messages I used to occasionally see from that list.

> > - getting on the "approved posters" list is not well documented or
> >   understood.  for some list software this is a manual operation
> >   requiring the list admin to edit a file; on others it is under
> >   control of the subscriber but he/she has to "subscribe" the alternate
> >   address using some obscure option like /NOMAIL.
> 
> Perhaps in the case of namedroppers the added [ post by non-subscriber... ]
> note can include the instructions on how to get added to that list.

ideally, I think, the instructions would come in the form of a response
sent back to the sender, rather than being sent to the list.  and they
should explain how to get on the approved poster list rather than expecting
everyone to post from their subscription address.